Power Couple: Bob Sirott and Marianne Murciano

Sirott and Murciano framed a poster from their first news show together.

The witty banter between TV cohosts isn’t always representative of their off-air relationship. Despite their camaraderie on the 1990s morning show Fox Thing in the Morning, Bob Sirott and Marianne Murciano were hardly friends away from the news desk. “I didn’t think he was very friendly,” Murciano says. “He wouldn’t speak to me off the air.”

At the suggestion of the news director, Murciano took Sirott to breakfast in the cafeteria of their Fox Chicago News Studio (“He can’t not talk if we’re having breakfast, right?” she says.) Thus a friendship—and later, a relationship— bloomed. At the end of the show’s six-year run, Sirott and Murciano, by then married, were announcing the birth of their daughter, Daniela.

Murciano’s almost one-year-old website, trainaman.com, came as a result of her relationship with Sirott, who currently coanchors Fox Chicago’s . “Bob came into my life when I was a single mom,” she says, speaking of her two children from a previous marriage. “I really needed him to get with the program or he couldn’t be a part of my life.” Thus the two developed a system of communication where they could speak up about what they needed and reward each other for fulfilling those needs—and Murciano saw the opportunity to show other women how this could work for them, too. Now with seminars and a book in the works, the Train a Man empire is thriving. “I’m okay with being in all these classes,” says Sirott, who not only lived the training but also starred in many of the early Train a Man YouTube videos—“I just don’t have passing grades in many of them.”

Thanks to their solid partnership and sheer exposure (the two also host a weekly show on WGN radio), Sirott and Murciano have become one of Chicago’s power couples. However, they won’t be found working the crowd at every high-profile event. “We very much like to do things with our family,” Sirott says. Although—in terms of influence—Murciano concedes, “a lot of people now have Bob’s neckties.”